Kent Rupp spent much of his long and productive life as a self-aware and responsive citizen of the contemporary world. Politics and current events make frequent appearances in his vibrant and evocative canvases, in a key distinction from most of his figurative or abstract expressionist predecessors. When I met him in the 1960s, he was actively campaigning against capital punishment, a practice he considered not just cruel, but also barbaric. Later, he sat on the citizen Board of Directors for the local offices of the War on Poverty, and at one point, brought supplies to Alcatraz on his sailboat to support the 19-month Native American occupation of the island between 1969 and 1971.
No wonder, then, that for the ultimate artistic project – the finale – he returned to the politically charged arena of his activist years. But there's another dimension: These 16 collages unite Kent's consummate craft and compositional expertise with his humanist sensibilities. And they resonate beyond that too. In many Asian cultures, there is a practice known as the Death Poem, in which the artist, who has pursed a lifetime of study of the arts of expression and representation, writes the poem of their death.
This collection of collages, The Displaced, constitute the Death Poem of Kent Rupp, his final statement to the world about damaged human systems, disasters he saw and understood and analyzed in scrupulous detail. He began the project in 2016. His early focus on images from the Syrian, African, and Myanmar crises expanded to embrace the displaced millions constantly in the news, images of their anquish everywhere.
He finished the first collage April, 2017, and by then the new Trump administration had begun their unspeakably cruel practices toward refugees fleeing from the horrors of their native land to seek asylum in the United States. Children in cages, families separated as a tactic to discourage immigration, abuse, suicides, inhumane treatment on a massive scale, ever present in news sources – these atrocities moved the humanitarian and the idealist in Kent to what he called an obsession to respond to the global catastrophe. As the project unfolded, he came to see it as a kind of poem – a visual rendering of his visceral reactions to human suffering.
Kent's lifelong study of art and the history of art were key factors in the way this project developed. Looking at any of the collages as a whole, before focusing on the details, a viewer may sense a mystical dialogue between Kent Rupp and Hieronymus Bosch. In Bosch, grotesque and bizarre beings inhabit eerie landscapes and present the faces and postures of anguish. In The Displaced, Kent echoes Bosch's vision and puts before us, in the starkest light, the harsh truths about human failure and our crimes of power against one another.
In many of the collages, the image of an arch appears. Kent explained his use of the arch in two ways: It's a symbol of imperial power, and Kent frequently included symbolic images in his work; also, he said, it was a way to anchor his composition. At the heart of Kent's craftsmanship is an unflinching focus on the organization and placement of the image. He took into his heart the teaching of Richard Diebenkorn that getting everything to "sit just right" is the artist's job and worked assiduously to get every one of these collages to sit just right.
Other images, central to iconography in Western art, make their way into these collages. The Madonna and Child, for example, evoke both Christian tradition and of immigrant caravans from the Southern border. The crimes at the U.S. boarder dominate the project for a few of the collages, until the focus broadens again to a global perspective. Kent's deep understanding of the spiritual juxtaposes traditional imagery with the despair of the displaced. Shortly after the religious iconography enters the project, so do the images of bars and cells and cages.
As the depictions of anguish and displacement progress, they become more visually stark. Colors deepen into sepia and black. An arch frames the crucifixion and sits on top of a white slash above a newspaper photo of a child in a cage on the California border. The palette is supple: A wash of red or black transforms a newspaper photo into a kind of altarpiece. Prominent on this altarpiece is the image of Liberty, repeated in several of the collages. Near the end of the series, the image of Grief, crying on the shoulders of History from the Peace Monument in Washington D.C, appears.
These iconic images, emerging from the overwhelming compilations of the faces of suffering constitute what Kent called a clue. He was adamant that his final work, and, indeed, this entire artistic project, was "not meant to teach anybody anything – not didactic." Yet the iconography clearly points to the way that imperial power inflicts suffering on the powerless. The arches of "triumph" stand in ironic juxtaposition to the swirling masses of the displaced that surround them. Grief weeps on History's shoulder. Liberty stands blind and isolated as mothers and fathers reach out in vain to tumbling bodies falling through space. The Madonna and her doomed baby appear again and again among faces and bodies from the daily news. The images begin to mirror one another, presenting what Kent called the inescapable evidence of the suffering inflicted on the powerless by the privileged. Not surprisingly, images of priest and politicians punctuate these visions.
In several collages, images of Trump, architect of immigration cruelty, resemble a Bosch demon. Kent was always an enemy of stupidity, ignorance, and vanity. In this work, he stays with his lifelong convictions, always holding out the questions of why a person would choose the destructive, self-serving path of a narcissistic autocrat, but clear in the understanding that such a path leads to global catastrophe for the poor. Kent's vision reveals that the meek and the displaced do not inherit the earth.
To look at The Displaced is to look at inescapable facts of how our country, and so many other counties, have failed. Because to change the status quo would disadvantage the powerful, we have inflicted needless suffering on the innocent. The keen edge of Kent's lifelong dedication to justice and his reasonableness shape every collage.
One final thought: A lifetime spent in the study and pursuit of art can be a path to wisdom. Art produced at the end of life seems particularly significant because it is a final statement, a final gesture of that dedicated life. This is how we should look at the The Displaced. Like Monet's final Water Lilies series, like the final works of so many beloved artists, there is a poignancy in these collages – the cumulative result of a lifetime's work. Kent Rupp sometimes referred to himself in his last years as being "in his dotage," yet he worked on these collages with the same kind of dedication and energy he always brought to his art. He never stopped looking at the world and representing what he saw.
The Death Poem is a practice that positions the human will and the human heart as forces equal to the laws of nature. There's no escaping the end of life, but there's good reason to keep working, even so. The Displaced is a harsh lesson, but also a precious gift from a wise and generous spirit.